Wikinut is a UK publishing start-up that provides a branded platform for contributors to take a revenue share from advertising served alongside their content. Contributors can earn addition revenue by referring new contributors or becoming a moderator. Topics include range from self-improvement to business and from personal finance to family issues.

It’s the brainchild of founder Andy Walton. I caught up with him this weekend.

Give us the elevator pitch?
Wikinut is a new publishing community – you own the content, you keep the copyright, your name is all over it and we pay you lifetime royalties of all revenue generated.

How many pages have you got and how often do contributors add new content?
On average to date, our authors write about 5 pages each. Obviously this is spread across some prolific members at one end of the scale, and more casual authors at the other.

Many authors will add at least one page every day, others less frequently. All content is pre-moderated to ensure it is not copied, and meets our content guidelines.

Our average moderation time is well under 12 hours, and usually just a few hours so this process keeps the quality high without slowing down the publication.

Wikinut has only been live for a quarter, but even at this early stage we have thousands of unique pages with a very strong growth trend.

How many contributors have you got and how motivated are they?
Without giving exact numbers, we have a very healthy and rapidly growing community of authors. These authors are from all over the world; the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand, with many more Asian countries such as India, Thailand, the Philippines etc. This has really helped with the variety of content added, and has been a very pleasant surprise for us.

Our authors all have 2 main motivations: community and money.

Our last user survey indicated our users loved the sense of community, and they tell us that is as important as money for them.

We’ve had a far higher number of page comments that we’d anticipated, with readers and authors really engaging. Authors love to receive feedback so we also work hard on our moderation feedback and our author support. We also recently added an author follow feature (think Twitter) which has been well received and have more similar ideas in the development pipeline.

From the money angle, authors not only get their royalty share of pages they write, but also receive a 10% share of any friends they refer. This has been a great source of new users, and we also offer promo codes with certain partners to offer enhanced royalties.

Plus our best authors can be invited to become a moderator, which then allows another source of income as they are paid a share of any pages they publish.

Is it possible to make a living using WikiNut? Or as part of a wider portfolio career?
Most of our authors treat Wikinut as a hobby. Our professional writers tend to use Wikinut as one part of a portfolio of outlets for their writing. We are not currently aware of any professional Wikinut-only authors, but we believe it would be possible (especially for those users from Asia).

How do you promote content – and attract an audience and new contributors?
We are still operating our 2-pronged launch strategy for growth:

1) Organic – be this via search traffic (heavily SEO influenced markup, tags, content-hub information architecture), site reviews (such as our webuser.co.uk review), or high traffic blog posts (blog owners incentivised with our 10% affiliate scheme, plus guest posts contributed by ourselves)

2) Social networking – in addition to our refer-a-friend scheme, we teach our authors to promote their content on Facebook, Twitter etc. We have CRM email tutorials to hand-hold our authors through self-promotion, with case-studies and real world examples